Tuesday, February 28, 2006

Ice-Mine

Waiting at the accountant's, I doodled the various articles of hockey equipment. The shinpads look like small is set in blobs of glue. The jersey is something of an afterthought. There's a jacket you can wear over everything, as you walk out of the locker room, get a cup of hot chocolate, and go home. Most perplexing is probably the hockey stick that has been deconstructed — no tape on the blade (see the nearby roll of tape), hard-rubber butt end unattached, excess length about to be sawed away. Also, if all of these bits of ice-armor belonged to one person, s/he would be a very oddly shaped person indeed.

Perhaps I've been thinking of hockey because of the recent essay in the NYT book review bewailing the lack of a great American hockey novel — it correctly cites the one brilliant entry in the field, Amazons, by Cleo Birdwell (a pseudonym for Don DeLillo). Speaking of DD — I just finished reading his play Love-Lies-Bleeding. Pretty good! That's all I'll say for now.

Coincidentally: After my doodling session, I got an e-mail from my sister in which she reported on some recently uncovered some old postcards, probably ca. 1978. One was from a friend visiting Disneyworld. He asked how the weather was, said it was 90 degrees in Florida, and added, "P.S. We beat the Bruins 3-1." (We = the Buffalo Sabres.)

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Dizzyhead Sarah sent a link to an exceptionally good blog called A Year in Pictures Following the Break-Up — funny, sad, self-conscious to exactly the right degree. Read it from the very start, per the instructions. You won't be sorry!

...And you won't be sorry about listening to Destroyer's Rubies — an album so good that after you turn it off you start thinking in Destroyer-esque phrases, like your mind is breathing Destroyerish breaths as you go about your usual mental toil. I find this happens, too, upon being immersed in any good author's work — I distinctly remember this happening when I was reading a lot of DeLillo. (One cold night I was walking back from meeting a friend and I had been reading Running Dog and the air seemed full of menace; I thought, as I passed a bus shelter, kernels of broken glass — some formulation like that. and then all the glass in the shelter shattered!)